It is forbidden to ride a bike on highway. :-) But wait a minute, there is confusion in the word of highway in China.

I don’t know what is the exact difference between highway and freeway. Both the highest quality and speed way and normal state road connecting towns are all called highway.

For example, the A8 is connecting Shanghai and Hangzhou and A11 is connectiong Shanghai and Nanjing. They are called highway or high speed road (Gao Su Gong Lu). Meanwhile, on the road plate, the G318 connecting Shanghai and Pingwan (near Suzhou) and G320 connects Shanghai and Hangzhou. They almost takes the same route as A8 or A11, but was built too many years ago and is lower in standard – they are not high-speed road. For A road, there is no bike lane. For G road, they are bike lanes (for most roads)

For cyclers, we can only take the G318 or G320 road. And it is always free to anywhere in China by bicycle.

According to my understanding, a freeway in the U.S. is a road without another road intersecting it. In other words, a freeway is “free” of intersections. The only way to get on or off a freeway is via one of its on-ramps, off-ramps, or possibly the road which is at one end of and becomes the freeway. All the freeways I know of in the U.S. are numbered, but not all numbered roads are freeways. Highways usually refer to major thorough fares as opposed to local streets.

Thanks. Now I can safely refer to all roads like A8, A11 as freeway because they are free of interactions. For G318 or G320, they connects towns (actually connects one of the east-most city Shanghai to one of the west-most city, Lasa), so they are highway. :-)

I would like to think that highway is the more generic term, and freeways make up a subset of highways.

It may be that freeways are referred as such in the U.S. since they were built by the government (in the period after WWII, Eisenhower era) and did not charge any tolls. Actually in the Eastern part of the U.S. and in Canada, there have always been a lot of tollroads.